Archive Field Study Encyclopedic repositories of photographs and drawings have proved to be one of the most enduring creations of colonial politics. Such repositories, like the one which at present resides within the British Library, facilitated precisely the opposite of what we may think nineteenth century archaeological investigations were about. By bringing sites to scho… >

Filling Gaps Imbricated within this physical distancing, with respect to projects on history-making of India, was also the thrust of empirical proclivities, where ‘field observations’ were, paradoxically, to sanction the judgments that had already been made on India’s past. James Mill’s framework for the history of the Indian civilisation not only remained unquestioned, its… >

Buddhist Sites By locating Buddhist sites in north and central India, Cunningham could lay to rest speculations on the Buddha’s life-story. Of Rajgir, a site he plotted as Buddhist, he enthused that “every hill and stream had been made holy by the Buddha’s presence… Numerous ruined topes, sculpted friezes and inscribed pillars still remain scattered over the country as last… >

Essentialised Cultures Cunningham’s surveys and interpretation of the temple at Bodh Gaya, which he presented in The Mahabodhi, provides many examples of the ways in which he used photographs to physically fill in the ‘lost’ architectural details (Figure 12). Despite recognizing that local customs and rituals had made its marks within the body of this derelict Buddhist tem… >

Truth Values The use of archaeology to build up truth-values of notions derived from elsewhere is explicit in the ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ racial classifications that were imposed on the archaeological finds. The two categories into which the ‘races of India’ were variously placed, and which were touted as historical truths from the middle of the nineteenth century, allow… >

Replicating Truths The creation of ‘visual replica’ for ancient ruins and historical monuments has a long history outside photography and India. As scholars focused attention on first hand studies of phenomena, their reliance on illustrations, which could effectively transmit their own ‘true’ vision, grew in scale. In Britain, one of the earliest and most comprehensive samp… >

“The photographer will point his camera at each pinnacled niche or floriated doorway, he will take his sun painted sketch of each figured corbel or grotesque gargoyle; and in fact carry away in his portfolio every nice architectural detail long before time with his destructive hands shall have the opportunity to mar any more of the beauty of the original.” Introduction S… >

Archaeological Photography The role of archaeological photography for recording archaeological excavations remained common throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries, although, the scope of documentation changed with the onset of large-scale excavations. The objective from then on has been to transform photographs of sites into quantifiable documents, and establi… >

Early Efforts It is in these years that we find some of the earliest efforts of systematic photographing of excavations, one example being the photographs taken by Augustus le Plongeon and his wife, Alice, during their excavations in the Yucatan (Mexico) between 1873 and 1885. The excavators, who were also antiquarians and mystics, had hoped to attain fame and fortune by pu… >

Evidence Witness In the establishment, through archaeological conservation, of what the British by the beginnings of the twentieth-century prudently referred to as the ‘national heirlooms’ of India, photographs bespoke of their efforts (Figure 20) and examples occur well before Marshall directed the conservation programme of the Archaeological Survey of India from 190… >